Fable: You know what a pain it is to learn written Chinese (or Japanese kanji), right? Even native speakers have difficulties with them. How willing, do you think, would a gamer be to learn a whole new "language" just to play a game? Unless such a "language" has practical uses in activities other than gaming, I find the prospect of anyone having the dedication to familiarize themselves with such a system of communication highly dubious. Moreover, images can generate different interpretations. Take this, for instance: in heraldry, the color purple implies nobility or royalty, but in my home country, the color stands for jealousy. A human head implies honor; a leg or a foot implies stability; a snake implies wisdom, but I find it unlikely that these will be the first meanings that come to the minds of people who haven't had heraldric studies. (The snake will probably be taken entirely the wrong way.) To borrow a quote from Ed Greenwood, "Hamlet published in Klingon is great fun, but isn’t going to hit the bestseller lists, because your average American reader can’t understand or read Klingon, and doesn’t want to; the same goes for Dr. Seuss done in Latin."
DATD said:
Then I wouldn't be included in "most people".
That's nice. But can you claim to buy, oh, a few thousand copies of a game? Face it; most people are, like it or not, the ones that matter. Companies may very well want to work on ideals, but the cold hard fact is that they need to make a living.
